Piezography Pro Prints

Piezography Pro Prints

Released in 2016, Piezography Pro is a unique K6 ink system that makes the highest-quality fine-art monochrome prints in the world. With the industry’s best dMax, highest resolving fidelity, visually balanced toning options, and most uniform gloss, Piezography Pro has it all. The ink is micro-encapsulated and gloss compatible. The carbon particles in Piezography ink reflect and diffract light in very unique ways. Prints made with Piezography ink have a special tonal “depth” that is hard to explain verbally but when people see a print, they get it. Piezography ink also makes possible the finest digital negative process in the world: PiezoDN. Piezography is printed with the legendary QuadtoneRIP software by Roy Harrington..

Gloss Optomised

Piezography Pro has a newly invented micro co-polymer Gloss “chroma” Optimiser that surrounds each carbon/pigment particle in the ink and is also extended within a final “clear” ink channel. Piezography Pro encapsulates the entire gloss print under a protective layer from edge to edge all at the same time as the inking: no need to do a second print pass with the optimiser.

Tone Blending

Piezography Pro utilizes two inksets: warm and cool. These finely balanced ink hues make neutral when combined together at certain percentages enabling very creative control of the warm, neutral, and cool axes. Up to one million unique toning combinations can be achieved all from a single printer.

Neutral

Super Dark DMAX* (Blackness of Black)

When dMax is measured, it is generally communicated in terms of “Density”. When measuring matte blacks this is fairly straightforward. On Hahnemule Photo Rag paper, the new Piezography Pro Ultra HD matte black ink produces a density of 1.84 which is significantly darker than the Epson 7900 matte black (1.65) or the latest Epson P-800 matte black (1.75). Ultra HD is the darkest matte black ink commercially available!

When measuring photo blacks, density values are (often) arbitrarily calculated from the more scientifically standard “Luminance” values given by all of the various machines that measure reflected light. Luminance is the percentage of light reflected from a print. The conversion from Luminance to Density when it nears 3.0 is not exactly standard from one company to another, so each time a printer/ink company claims a certain density milestone (say Epson’s claim of 2.84 on Ultra Premium Glossy paper), it’s important to do the actual testing based on the more truthful Luminance standard. This way apples are not compared to oranges. We happen to have a brand-new Epson SureColor P800 in our R&D lab and we decided to test our new Piezography Pro ink against Epson inks using an older 3880 printer filled with Piezography Pro inks.

PiezoDN is a digital negative printing system like no other

Finest Quality Negatives in the World

PiezoDN software is a set of tools for printing and calibrating high-quality negatives using Piezography ink. As a result, the negatives it produces are capable of making thousands upon thousands of tonal transitions. This system truly matches the tonal breadth of noble-metal arts such as Platinum and Palladium printing.

Because PiezoDN is an inkjet printed negative, you can calibrate it perfectly for any given analogue process and print different negatives on the fly, something not done with more expensive LVT film burners.

PiezoDN is Darkroom v2

The developers of Piezography started building PiezoDN only for Palladium and Platinum printing but quickly realised it was capable of so much more. They have built base-line curves for Gum, Cyanotype, Salt, Ziatype, and Silver and haven’t stopping there. Over the next few years they hope to build the baseline curves needed for Malde-Ware printout Platinum, gravure, and the list keeps growing!

.7 Point Text? Yep.

A long time ago the resolution fidelity of Piezography was proven by printing 1pt text (something not possible using normal epson ink even with today’s newest pro printers). The developers have now gone a step further with PiezoDN and printed all of Alice in Wonderland at 3.5×4.5 inches in READABLE .7pt text. Of course you need a loupe to see it.

The negatives that PiezoDN produces are finer than the optical resolution of Platinum/Palladium or other hand-coated print-methods even when using single-point lights and vacuum easels. PiezoDN makes true contact-worthy negatives that rival or possibly surpass traditional photo negatives when using new-generation digital cameras such as the A7rII or medium-format digital backs.

When printed on silver paper, this system far-surpasses the leading digital silver printing services in both resolution, tonal fidelity, and the ability to print in your own darkroom on your paper of choice.